The 1996 RTAP User's Group (RUG) Meeting was held in Banff, Canada, March 11 through March 13. The RUG meets yearly to discuss, among other things, product direction, various applications of RTAP, and any special user concerns.
This year's meeting was organized over two and a half days:
March 11
A presentation by representatives of Computerized Processes Unlimited, a presentation by HP on RTAP status and direction, and a user question and answer session.
March 12
Presentations by representatives of California Water Company, Allen/Bradley, and Xytech, followed by the RUG Business Meeting.
March 13
Presentations by representatives of Shell UK and Rust Engineering
This year's conference was another great success. Many thanks to Alison Pomeroy and Gary Biagioni of tesserNet for all of their hard work in putting together such a worthwhile two and a half days.
March 11, 1996
The first day consisted of one presentation by a System Integrator, a presentation by HP on RTAP status and direction, and a user question a nd answer session. The first presentation was given by Thomas Accardo of Computerized Processes Unlimited (CPU). The presentation detailed two of CPU's most recent products: Rtap2Pi and The CPU Trender. Rtap2Pi is CPU's product that "glues" RTAP to a commercially available long term data storage system called PI, available from Oil System's Incorporated (OSI). Thomas also discussed a plotting package available from CPU. This package can hook up to any data source and plot pens on multiple graphs. Currently the plotting package has been implemented with hooks into the RTAP Database for real-time trends and into the PI system for plotting of long-term history data.
The talk given by HP on RTAP status and direction on was one of the meeting highlights. Ron Dernyk (The RTAP R&D Product Manager) spoke of three major areas of RTAP related enhancements. The first announcement was that HP has incorporated CPU's SCL(R) product into RTAP and HP will be selling the SCL(R) product. SCL(R) is built on top of the Tcl/Tk toolkit and consists of a one-to-one mapping between Tcl and the RTAP API. Using SCL(R) makes programming with the RTAP API considerably easier and vastly reduces development time.
HP's second announcement is that they are working on a product called Enterprise Link that is to be released Q3 96. Enterprise Link is designed to allow companies to easily transfer process control information to other areas of the business enterprise, as well as handle information flow from other business systems to the RTAP Database. In this way, recipe information can be passed from a document control system to the RTAP system. A business application (connected to control information via the Enterprise Link) would also be able to generate a report based on certain control objectives, e.g.., create a report when x% enrichment is attained over a period of y hours. HP believes the new software paradigm is object oriented component software. What this means to Calgary Product Development Center (CPDC) is that they don't have to create a product that is "all things to all people". Their mission is to create the ability to link RTAP (CPDC referred to RTAP as their "crown jewel") to all other layers of systems necessary for a "business enterprise" to operate successfully.
HP's third announcement is that they are porting the RTAP Core to the NT platform. The RTAP Core is the RTAP Database, RTAP API, Alarm Manager and Data Acquisition (Scan Tasks) functions. HP envisions PC clients connecting to RTAP on a server running NT or UNIX getting their RTAP information via OPC (OLE for Process Controls). OPC is an interface being developed by Microsoft and others to provide a standard interface for software developers. HP announced availability of the NT version of RTAP in Q1 97.
Hardware developers are supposed to provide OPC compliant drivers so that software developers don't have to care about data sources. HP is not porting RtapSchematX to the PC. They expect to team with a PC based display server and are unwilling to name possible sources. HP will be in a position to announce a compatible PC display client in about 4 months. Until then, one can only speculate.
The late afternoon of day one was a question and answer session chaired by HP. Most users asked questions about the port to NT and the Enterprise Link product's affect on support of the existing client base running on UNIX platforms. HP assured us that they plan to support and enhance UNIX based systems, as well as NT systems for the foreseeable future.
Monday evening a "Casino Night" and dinner were given for all RUG delegates and their guests. This allowed delegates to meet with other RTAP Users, System Integrators, as well as reconnect with the RTAP developers from Calgary. In a scene highly reminiscent of last year's Murder Mystery Dinner, yet an other Biagioni came away with a nice prize. Some of us have considered changing our last names for next year's conference to see if we might win...
March 12, 1996
The second day of the conference consisted of presentations by representatives of California Water Company, Allen/Bradley, and Xytech, followed by the RUG Business Meeting.
Richard Yee, of California Water Company presented a World Wide Web Application capable of monitoring and simple maintenance of Cal. Water's RTAP based SCADA system. Richard created an application that allows views of RTAP Schematics via a Netscape browser. This enables technicians at California Water Service to remotely view the status of water tank levels and alarms at sites throughout Central and Southern California. Additionally, a technician is able to edit the RTAP Database through the browser. Richard wrote all the Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) necessary for creating his Home Page, as well as all the Common Gateway Interface (CGI) scripts necessary to implement the Server side of the application. He also described an implementation of RTAP alarming that triggers Alpha Pagers when specified alarm conditions exist. The ability to page technicians when alarm conditions exist and allow them to monitor and maintain the Supervisory System from remote locations increases Cal Water's ability to respond quickly and efficiently to off-normal conditions.
The technical person originally scheduled to give the talk for Allen/Bradley was unable to attend the conference. The presentation was given instead by a non-technical member of the staff. He gave the first half of the presentation which outlined Allen/Bradley's products. He showed the first few slides of the technical presentation on configuring scan tasks and then advised the audience to contact the original presenter for questions regarding scan tasks.
Myron Selby of Xytech presented a Failover System implementation currently in use by Interprovincial Pipeline Company (IPL). RTAP does not provide hooks for redundancy. Failover requirements are typically quite different from one system to another, which makes Redundancy a very difficult feature for RTAP to provide that simultaneously meets several user's needs effectively. Xytech's failover strategy for IPL was a collaboration between IPL, Xytech, tesserNet and CPDC. The failover solution was based on RTAP's powerful notion of Alarm Classes and used many features provided by the RTAP Database as well. The failover implementation presentation was quite useful as it provided a detailed view of one way to exploit the flexibility of RTAP to provide a customized failover capability.
The RUG Business Meeting was held late in the afternoon. New officers were elected and arrangements for next year's conference were discussed. RUG delegates concurred that the Company Information Forms that each company filled out at the beginning of the conference were beneficial and should be used again next year. The forms indicate which parts of RTAP the company uses, the company's industry and any other custom applications that may be of interest to a wider audience.
March 13, 1996
The last day of the conference was a morning session only. Two presentations were given. The first was given by Shell UK EXPRO (Exploration and Production) and the second by Rust Engineering. The Shell presentation was given by George Mager and Ian Langmead on their RTAP system that manages oil and gas production in the North Sea. This presentation showed a planned migration from an existing system consisting of 150,000 data inputs to an RTAP system with approximately the same number of inputs over a two and a half year time scale. The migration began in January 1996 and will be complete in June 1998. One of Shell's main technical challenges was overcoming the problems inherit in dealing with satellite propagation delay. This was a very interesting presentation of how RTAP can be applied to solve the challenges of the off-shore oil and gas production industry.
The last presentation was given by Bob Gellings of Rust. Rust focuses on MES (Manufacturing Execution System) integration with RTAP. Rust has be en working with HP and SAP on the Enterprise Link product announced during the conference. The presentation focused on the software and hardware components needed to integrate with Enterprise Link.
March 12, 1996
Banff, Alberta
Respectfully submitted,
Dave Milton,
Secretary/Treasurer